At the present time in cosmology there are no compelling alternative models that can account for the anomalies.

(i) the Ecliptic plane is seen to carefully thread itself between a hot and cold spot and there is a clear power asymmetry across the Ecliptic plane;(ii) the planarity of the octopole and the alignment of the quadrupole and octopole planes is clearly visible – note the re- markable near-overlap of the quadrupole and octopole maximum angular momentum dispersion axes;(iii) the area vectors lie near each other, near the Ecliptic plane, and also near the dipole direction.

......alignments persist at the 95 to 99.9 per cent level, with the strongest alignment occurring with the dipole direction (99.6 per cent).....

In all cases the observed alignments reside far in the tail of the expected distributions......even given the relative location of the quadrupole and octopole area vectors (i.e. their mutual alignment), the Ecliptic plane and dipole alignments are unlikely at the 95 per cent level.

In summary, the quadrupole and octopole alignments noted in early WMAP full-sky maps persist in the WMAP seven-year and final (nine-year) maps, and in the Planck first-year full-sky maps. The correlation of the quadrupole and octopole with one another, and their correlations with other physical directions or planes – the dipole, the Ecliptic, the Galaxy – remain broadly unchanged across all of these maps. Consequently, it is not sufficient to argue that they are less significant than they appear merely by appealing to the uncertainties in the full-sky maps – such uncertainties are presumably captured in the range of foreground removal schemes that went into the map making.

Alan, I strongly suspect it was, but because of the incredible scientific implications and beyond which are involved, the worldly winds of a mega paradigm shift may not have been strong enough yet to try forcing a mainstream move on that immense sacred cosmic monolith, the Copernican Mythapal. Nevertheless, we can be quite confident now, of course, that just like the frog to prince fairytale is more than halfway into the scientific dumpster so too the days of Big Bang Baloney and Einstein's fantasy concoctions are numbered.

Praise be to God the Creator and man's God given (but all too often neglected and or abused) scientific observational common sense!

@Alan: These alignments were first hinted at all the way back in the late 1990's with the COBE mission. The WMAP mission clearly showed the Axis (this is when the name "Axis of Evil" was first attached to the observations, back around the time we we invaded Iraq).

Evil why?

Evil because it obviously causes major headaches for the Big Bang community.

Now the real, possibly killer development is in the dipole observations covered here: